For almost the past 2 weeks (and some months for other part of the stacks), we have automated daily release of most of the Unity components directly delivered to Ubuntu raring. And you can see thosedifferentkindsofautomateduploads published to the ubuntu archive.

Why?

The whole Unity stack has grown tremendously in the past 3 years. At the time, we were able to release all components, plus packaging/uploading to ubuntu in less than an hour! Keeping the one week release cadence by then was quite easy, even though a lot of work. The benefit was that it enabled us to ensure that we have a fluid process to push what we developped upstream to our users.

As of today, teams have grown by quite some extends, and if we count everything that we develop for Unity nowadays, we have more than 60 components. This covers from indicators to the theme engine, from the open input framework to all our tests infrastructure like autopilot, from webapps to web credentials, from lenses to libunity, and finally from compiz to Unity itself without forgetting nux, bamf… and the family is still growing rapidly with a bunch of new scopes coming down the pipe through the 100 scopes project, our own SDK for the Ubuntu phone, the example applications for this platform we are about to upload to Ubuntu as well… Well, you got it, the story is far from ending!

So, it's clear that those numbers of components that we develop and support will only go higher and higher. The integration team already scaled by large extends their work hours and rush to get everything delivered timely to our user base[1]. However, it's with no question that we won't be able to do that forever. We don't want as well introducing artificial delays to our own upstream on when we are delivering stuff to our users. We needed to solve that issue while not paying any price on quality, nor balancing the experience we deliver to our users. We want to keep high standards, and even, why not allying this need while providing an even a better, more reliable, and better evaluation before releasing of what we eventually upload to Ubuntu from our upstreams. Getting our cake and eat it too!

Trying to change for the better

What was done in the last couple of cycles was to separate between 2 groups the delivery of those packages to the users. There was an upstream integration team, which will hand over to the Ubuntu platform team theorically ready-to-upload packages, making the reviews, helping them, fixing some issues and finally sponsoring their work to Ubuntu. However, this didn't really work for various reasons and we quickly realized that this ended up just complexifying the process instead of easing it out. You can see a diagram of where we ended up when looking back at the situation:

Seems easy isn't it? Due to those inner loops and gotchas, in addition to the whole new set of components, we went from a weekly release cadence to doing 4 to 5 solid releases during a whole cycle.

Discussing about it with Rick Spencer, he gave me a blank card on thinking how we can make this more fluid to our users and developers. Indeed, with all the work piling up, it wasn't possible to release immediatly the good work that upstream did in the past days, which can lead to some frustration as well. I clearly remember that Rick used the term "think about platform[2] as a service". This kind of immediatly echoed in me, and I thought, "why not trying that… why not releasing all our code everyday and delivering a service enabling us to do that?"

Even if not planned from the beginning (sorry, no dark, hidden, evil plan here), thinking about it, this makes sense as part of some kind a logical progression from where we started since Unity exists:

Releasing every week, trying manually to get the release in a reasonable shape before uploading to Ubuntu

Raise the quality bar, put some processes for merge reviewing.

Adding Acceptance Criterias thanks to Jason Warner, ensuring that we are getting some more and more good tests and formal conditions on doing a release

Automate those merges through a bot, ensuring that every commits in trunk builds fine, that unit tests are passing

Raise again the quality bar, adding more and more integration tests

Being able and ensuring we are able to release daily seems really, looking at it, par of the next logical step! But it wouldn't have been possible without all those past achievements.

Advantages of daily releases

It's quite immediate to see a bunch of positive aspects of doing daily releases:

We can spot way faster regressions. If a new issue arose, it's easier to bisect through packages and find the day when the new regression or incorrect behavior started to happen, then, looking at the few commits to trunk (3-5?) that was done this day and pinpoint what introduced it.

This enables us to deliver everything in a rapid, reliable, predictable and fluid process. We won't have crazy rushes as we had in the past cycles around goal dates like feature freezes to get everything in the hand of the user by then. This will be delivered automatically the day after to everyone.

I see also this as a strong motivation for the whole community who contributes to those projects. Not having to wait a random date hidden in a wiki for a "planned release date" to see the hard work you put into your code to be propagated to the user's machines. You can immediately see the effect of your hacking on the broader community. If it's reviewed and approved for merging (and tests passes, I'll come back to that later), it will be in Ubuntu tomorrow, less than 24 hours after your work reached trunk! How awesome is that?

This also means that developers will only need to build the components they are working on. No need for instance to rebuild compiz or nux to do an Unity patch because the API changed and you need "latest everything" to build. Lowering the entry for contributing and chances that you have unwanted files in /usr/local staying around conflicting with the system install.

Challenges of daily release

Sure, this comes with various risks that we had to take into account when designing this new process:

The main one is "yeah, it's automated, how can you be sure you don't break Ubuntu pushing blindly upstream code to it?". It's a reasonable objection and we didn't ignore it at all (having the history of years of personal pain on what it takes to get a release out in an acceptable shape to push to Ubuntu)

How to interact properly with the Ubuntu processes? Only core developpers, motus, and per-package uploaders have upload rights to Ubuntu. Will this new process in some way give our internal upstream the keys to the archives, without having them proper upload rights?

How ensuring packaging changes and upstream changes are in sync, when preparing a daily release?

How making useful information in the changelog so that someone not following closely upstream merges but only looking at the published packages in raring-changes mailing list or update-manager can see what mainly changed in an upload?

How to deal with ABI breaks and such transitions, especially when they are cross-stacks (like a bamf API change impacting both indicators and Unity)? How to ensure what we deliver is consistent across the whole stacks of components?

How do we ensure that we are not bindly releasing useless changes (or even an upload with no change at all) and so, using more bandwith, build time, and so on, for nothing?

How then?

I'll detail much of those questions and how we try to address those challenges in the subsequent suite of blog posts. Just for now, to sum up, we have a good automated test suite, and stacks are only uploaded to Ubuntu if:

their internal and integration tests are passing above a certain theshold of accepted failures.

they don't regress other stacks

Stabilizing those tests to get reliable result was a tremendous work for a cross-team effort, and I'm really glad that we are confident in them to finally enable those daily release.

On another hand, additional control is made to ensure that packaging changes are not committed without someone with upload right being in the loop for acking the final change before the copy to the distribution happens.

Of course, the whole machinery is not limited to this and is in fact way more complicated, I'll have the pleasure the write about those in separate blog posts in the following days. Stay tuned!

Since approximately the beginning of the raring development cycle, I had an issue on my thinkpad x220 with google hangouts forcing me to use a tablet or a phone to handle them. What happened is that once I entered a hangout, after 40-60s, my sound was muted and there was no way to get the microphone back on, same for ouptut from other participants. Video was still working pretty well.

Worse, even after exiting the hangout, I could see the webcam was still on and the plugin couldn't reconnect or recreate a hangout, I had to kill the background google talk process to get it working back (for less than a minute of course ;)).

Finally, I took a look this morning and googling about that issue. I saw multiple reports of people tweaking the configuration file to disable volume auto adjustement. So, I gave it a try:

Edit ~/.config/google-googletalkplugin/options

Replace the audio-flags value set to 3 to use 1 (which seems disabling this volume auto adjustement feature)

Then, kill any remaining google talk process if you have some and try a hangout. I tested for 5 minutes and I was still able to get the sound working! After quitting the hangout, the video camera is turned off as expected. I can then restart another hangout, so the google talk process don't seem to be stalled anymore.

Now, it's hard to know what regressed as everything was working perfectly well on ubuntu 12.10 with that hardware. I tried on chromium, chrome canary and firefox with the same result. The sound driver don't seem to be guilty as I tried to boot on an 12.10 kernel. The next obvious candidate is then pulseaudio, but it's at the same version than in 12.10 as well. So it seems to be in the google talk plugin, and I opened a ticket on the google tracker.

At least, with that workaround, you will be able to start next year with lasting sound during your hangouts if you got this problem on your machine.

The Call for talks for the Crossdesktop devroom at FOSDEM 2013 is getting to its end this very Friday! This year, we'll have some Unity related talks. If you are interested in having one, no time to lose and submit your talk today!

Last Wednesday, we had our Quickly reboot on air hangout, welcoming the community to ask questions about Quickly and propose enhancement.

Here is the recording of the session:

As for the previous sessions, we had a lot of valuable feedbacks and participation. Thanks everyone for your help! Your input is tremendous to shape the future of Quickly.

We are making a small pause in the Quickly Reboot hangouts, but we will be back soon! Meanwhile, you can catch up on the session notes, and provide feedback/ideas on this wiki page! Follow us on google+ to ensure to not miss any annoucement.

The previous Quickly reboot session about templates was really instructive! It started a lot of really interesting and opened discussions, particularly on the Quickly talks mailing list where the activity is getting higher and higher. Do not hesitate to join the fun here.

Next session: Q&A!

But we don't stop here, the next session will be hold this Wednesday! If you read through the previous links, you will see a lot of pending questions we have still to discuss about, this will be used as the base conversation of the session. However, in addition to those topics, all of your questions will be taken into account as well! You can jump during the session on #quickly on freenode, while watching the show on ubuntuonair. You can as well prepare your questions and new ideas for Quickly, and post them to the google moderator page. There are plenty of ways to participate and help shaping the future of Quickly. Do not miss this session and subscribe to it right now.

Also, ensure you won't miss anything about Quickly and its reboot by subscribing to our google+ page.

Previous sessions

The first two hangouts on Quickly reboot about developer feedback were really a blast! I'm really pleased about how much good ideas and questions emerged from those.

If you missed them, the hangouts on air are available now on youtube. Go and watch them if you are interested:

I've also taken some notes during the sessions, here are what I think was important and came from them: hangouts notes. It's a wiki, if you do have any feedback/questions/other subjects you want to get discussed, don't be shy and edit it! Quickly is a fully community-driven project and we love getting constructive feedbacks/new ideas from everyone.

I've also added on it some nice spot of discussions for future sessions, and speaking of sessions…

Next step: default templates

Next session is a really important one: what should be the default templates in Quickly? From the previous discussions, seems that python + gtk, a html5 one and the already existing unity-lens ones are the good candidates. If so, what should be in every of each of those? How should look the default applications? Which framework (if any) in the case of html5 should we use? Should we make opinionated choices or just providing a default set? What should we provide as tools for them, and so on…

Join the conversation, I'm sure it will be a lot of fun! We plan to have the hangout at 4PM UTC on Wednesday. Ensure to follow it either by jumping in the hangout itself or by following the onair session. Mark it to down to you calendar not miss it!

Do not hesitate to follow the Quickly google+ page to not miss any future events and enhancements to Quickly.

Some choices were good, some were wrong and we adapted to the emerging needs that happened along the road. Consequently, the project evolved, the needs as well and we tried to make them match as much as possible. Overall, my opinion is that the project evolved in a healthy way, and has strong arguments seeing the number of projects using it successfully for the ubuntu developer contest. Indeed, from the ~150 submitted projects, most of them were created with Quickly and seeing the few support we needed to do, it means that most of things are working quite well! Also, the comments on the developer contest seems to be really positive about Quickly itself.

So? Time to go the beach and enjoy? Oh no… Despite this great success, can we do better? I like that sometimes, we can step back, look around, and restate the project goals to build an even brighter future, and I think now is this time and that's why I want to announce a Quickly reboot project!

Why a reboot?

We will need to port Quickly itself to python3, we have no hard deadline right now on it, but it's something (especially with unicode versus string) that I want to do soon. As this will ask a lot of refactoring, I guess it's time to evaluate the current needs, drop some code, completely use another direction to attract more 3rd party integrator (like do people want to integrate Quickly with their favorite IDE?), encourage template developers, make everything even more testable than today to avoid regressions… A lot of things are possible! So a reboot, meaning "let's put all aside, list what we have and what we want to do" is the appropriate term.

!Do you have a detailed plan right now of what is coming?

No… and that's exactly what I wanted! Well, of course, I have some ideas on papers and know globaly where I want the project to evolve, but the whole plan is to get the community contributing ideas, experiences before the first line of the reboot is even written.

I'm sold! how to participate?

I will run some google hangouts from the Quickly Google+ page. Those will be hangout on air (so you can just view them live or after the hangout without participating), asking questions/suggestions on #ubuntu-community-onair on freenode (IRC) for answering live, or you can jump in and ask directly during the show.

The current hangout will be also available (with an IRC chat box) on this page.

Those hangouts will be thematic to focus the discussion, and will be announced on the google+ Quickly page, this blog, the Quickly mailing list and so on…

First step… feedbacks, 2 chances to join!

The first step to build this Quickly next gen[1] is to gather some developers feedback. So, if you are a developer who used Quickly (or not!) and make softwares for ubuntu, in the context of the app showdown (or not!), we will love to ear from you! The goal of the session is not to point to any particular bug, but rather to share how the experience was for you, what template did you use, what template you would have used if it existed, what went well or bad with the workflow, when did you need to ask a question about a particular subjects? Of course, we are not limited to those questions.

You can directly jump into the hangout to ask your question live or just assist to the hangout on air and add a comment to the live event to get it read during the show.

Note

Seeing the amount of interests we saw around Quickly the past last years was really awesome!

Now that we have some more detailed view on how people are using the tool, it's time to collect and think about those data to see how we can improve Quickly. With all the new tools available like hangouts on air, it can be also now time to experiment how we can use them and use this opportunity to have a very open collaboration process as well as trying to attract more people to contribute to it.

More on that next week. To ensure to not miss anything, please follow the Quickly Google+ page.

In addition to that, it was the good timing to experiment more seriously some mocking tool for testing the online part of the lens, and so I played with python3-mock, which is a really awesome library dedicated to that purpose[1].

So here was my playground: an Unity dedicated radio lens! You can search through thousands of online available radios, ordered by categories with some contextual informations based on your current language and your location (Recommended, Top, Near you).

As with most of lenses you can refine any search results with filters. The supported ones are countries, decades and genres. The current track and radio logos are displayed if supported and double clicking any entry should start playing the radio in rhythmbox.

This small tool is trying to solve a problem we encountered for a long time as a distributor, but had to postpone it way too long because of other priorities.
It basically enables packagers and maintainers to migrate in user session data. Indeed, when you upgrade a package, the packaging tools are running under root permissions, and only hackish solutions was used in the past to enable us to change some parts of your user configuration[1], like adding the FUSA applet, adding new compiz plugins on the fly… There are tons of example when a distribution needs to migrate some user data (logged or not when the upgrade is proceeding) without patching heavily the upstream project to add a migration support there.

This tool is executed at session startup, in a sync fashion. It contains caching and tries to execute the minimal chunk[2], based on the design of the excellent gconf->gsettings migration tool. It contains as well a dh-migrations package, with a debhelper hook (--with migrations calling dh_migrations), so that client desktop packages just have to ship a debian/<package>.migrations file linking to their migration scripts which will be shipped in the right directory. We can even imagine in the near future that when you install such a package, you end up with a notification that a session restart is necessary (and not a full reboot). Note as well that the migration happens per user and per session, so it's really important that the scripts are idempotents.

Was 3 days of fun coding this. All of the C and perl codes are covered by a short, but complete testsuite run during the package build, so no breakage hopefully. Associated man pages are session-migration and dh_migrations.

Just got it merged (and will be freshly available in Unity 6.0 coming soon in quantal)!

I spent few hours last week to add rhythmbox radios (and writing unit tests) for the music lens. It's been a long time I didn't write some serious vala (I guess last time was for unity's Alt+F2). I confirm it's still not my favorite langage

Coming back to the radios, they will now show as the last row (after tracks, albums and eventually online purchase ones), and they respect (if the metadata are provided in rhythmbox) to every usual music lens filters. Some obligatory screenshot:

Coming soon, some more news about online radios searching directly in unity (just need a patch in dee for python3 support being released first)

Spend few hours installing Android ICS (Cyanogenmod built for x86) on my exopc tablet and playing with it.

I've never been impressed by Meego installed on it as a developer preview, performance and feature-wise. I've found yesterday evening those instructions and links about a corvusmod rebuild of cynagenmod and I gave it a try! Of course, as this is not an arm device but x86 one, not a lot of applications are working out of the box, but overall, the UI is totally functional and browsing the web is a delightful experience.

After migrating to a google nexus phone (my previous phone had android 2.2), I'm now full ICS at home and I love it! Well done Android team for taking hard decisions and focusing on the user experience itself[1]. This tremendous turn on having coherent and well-designed UI gave a lot of credits to the whole OS. Everything is now smooth on my phone AND my tablet and I love the whole ecosystem integration.

I hope we will be able to deliver the same kind of experience on ubuntu, coherent and centralized ecosystem where going from one device to another is almost seamless. I noted as well that the base OS image is only ~170 Mb. I wonder if we could achieve something similar seeing for how many releases we stroke to find enough space on the old 700Mb limitation… I guess we will have to take drastic decisions, but this time, keep them straight as we already tried 2 years ago with the netbook edition flavor

Note

[1] And I'm really happy that at Canonical, we are currently doing the same on Ubuntu

Well, ok, not really, but in fact, this is after doing some exercice after an unity release, so it's exactly the same, isn't it?

This particular release didn't follow this rule though. Even if last Friday and Monday were a little bit rushy, we kept merging latest patches on a regular basis to polish the Unity experience on 3D as well as on 2D for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Nothing scary emerged at the last minute. Also, thanks to the community testing (85 results for unity 3D and 7 for unity 2D, you rock guys!), we were able to analyze and fix the most important issues that were raised before releasing, taking our time to upload Unity before the Finale Freeze. The long stability trail we had in Unity for the whole precise development release clearly shows that the new processes in place and the maturity of Unity are paying off.

I'll even tell you a secret, since we started the Unity journey, I've never been so proud and positive about any unity release than I'm on this 5.10. Consequently, this finale version of Unity on this quality-based ubuntu 10.04 LTS sounds like a Perfect timing for a Precise release for the Pangolin.

In addition to that, this latest release will give you a nice extra cookie for configuring the HUD key in the launcher category of the shortcuts in gnome-control-center for both Unity 2D and 3D.

Of course, it's not the complete end of the unity story in precise, we will maybe be able to fix some crashes that a wider testing would potentially give us before the finale release (and we have two small issues in minds we want to fix also before precise is released or in a first SRU), but we are very confident that Unity in 12.04 LTS will be the greatest Unity experience ever! Good job team, thanks to everyone who contributed through bug reports, code, translations, testing… We won't be were we are now without you!

As I write Unity 5.8 is currently building on our official builders and will reach ubuntu precise soon. For this release, a big part of the stack was uploaded (14 components) including unity, unity-2d, nux of course, but also compiz 0.9.7.2 and the lenses (with some ABI breaks in the middle).

What's new on this unity release? Well, you can see the 3d milestone and 2d bug fixes (look also at this one for unity 2d which landed last monday). Keep in mind also that some 3d bug fixes benefits 2d as well! So, a lot of bug unitfixes, but that's not only it! We also got some UI refinements, some very visible, some more hidden, but it's all those little touch which makes the whole experience better!

Do not forget as well that the music lens is now taking back an important role as it supports rhythmbox in addition to banshee!

Also, we won some multimonitors new capabilities in both 2d and 3d. Basically, you can now decide if you want sticky edges between your monitors or not[1], and decide if you want one launcher (which is then set on your primary monitor), or a launcher on each monitor. Gnome Control Center was patched to add those default options (which only appears on an unity session) back to the main experience. You will now notice as well a more "unityish" preview with a panel and a launcher displayed. Dragging the launcher also enables to change where you want to set it in addition to the combobox (think about clicking on apply to get the choice taken into account!).

We encountered some hiccups but we either fixed them or workarounded other issues for landing the new stack in beta2. We still have an annoying issue which seems to be appearing rarely (only on some configurations). This is logged as critical on this bug. If you encounter this latter, you should choose the unity-2d session for now on your logging screen. Well done to everyone involved on this release!

We are trying as well a new approach to avoid having the current development version of ubuntu uninstallable for a while (because of a long dependency chain in all the related unity components) while everything is building. Basically, we are using experimentally the -proposed pocket and once everything is built, it will be copied to the main archive. Thanks for the release team to push the right buttons to enable this, let's hope this experiment will be successful and that we can generalize it in Q for every unity release and other components (and not only when we are frozen)!

Note

Phew! it's been a long road to release the next unity, but I'm more than happy to finally announce the release of 5.6. Unity components (dee, libunity, bamf, lenses, nux) and unity itself, plus some compiz snapshots (post 0.9.7.0) are part of this release. The packages are currently building on the official builders and should be soon available to you.

No particular new feature apart from better ibus support are part of it, plus a tons of bug fixes and some miscelleanous improvements:
- Daniel van Vungt landed a patch in compiz that enhances its performance for more than 51%! When you test it, I can ensure you feel a real noticeable difference (in particular on older machines, like mine).
- The alt tap false positive revealing the HUD is now part of the past. We know this one was annoying people, I can only tell you it's been technically challenging ;). This has been a rocking combined effort in compiz/unity sides.
- the file lens can now find files that were never opened before.

I mentioned challenge… Yeah this release was challenging both process-wise and technically one. We noticed once we had frozen the code quite a fair number regressions. Tracking them and fixing took some times, regressed other things to track, asked for a new round of testing, regressed another part… That was a funny quite of race between issues as you can infer.
But we keep it straight, we didn't release before everything was ready. Precise is about quality, and we will keep this strict path until 12.04 LTS is here (and continue after that!). All branches that enter trunk, at release time, have sensible tests associated. Tests are improved everyday and becoming easier to write thanks to the restless Thomi's work. We are more and more confident in everyone's work thanks to that.

Of course, everything is not perfect, the freeze process is debated and we will discuss how things can be improved, particularly when we have a long freeze time because of multiple regressions like this time. We are building upon those feedbacks and hope to make the process even better as soon as for executing it for unity 5.8, our next target.

Phew! It's been a crazy ride to release Unity 5.2 once ubuntu precise released its alpha 2, but we finally get there!

Thanks a lot for all the community participation, we actually got 27 testers answering to Nick's call for testing. Those were high quality contributions and enabled us to get closer to the unity release.

So, what's new since 5.0? Well, a lot! More precisely, we got multimonitor support with screen edge detection, "push to reveal" launcher behavior to avoid false positive when hitting the back button of firefox, per workspace alt-tab switcher, new home dash, automaximize only on netbooks and a lot of small details that matter.

Test results

Here are some feedback after 5 hours that I took to collect and analyze the test results from all the (numerous) comments that were on the test results:

Testers confirmed that some of the issues spotted on 5.0 are now fixed, which is a great news! Not all of them, and of course, we have some minor regressions. I added those issues to the list of "distro priorities". You can look at them there. This list doesn't show all the defects we have, of course, but give a good overview of the big ones we track to ensure they are fixed as soon as possible.

Some tests have been updated due to new upstream behavior (like the per workspace scale option and new home dash which now retains its search status). Thanks for people testing it and to have spotted that we missed those changes when updating the tests! We also rephrased with the given suggestions some of them.

Some people seem to get difficulties to open menus from the application and the indicator when clicking on them in the panel (only Alt or F10 seems to work). I strongly invite them to open a bug repot with a video attached and giving more info as I couldn't reproduce it there.

There is a bamf bug revealing only on some particular circumstances (8 fails, and last time, we also get some failures on this test) when testing launcher/quicklist-pin. I personnaly couldn't reproduce it here. Then, I asked seb128 to give it a shot and he could get the issue. I tried again and this time, I got it! However, this seems to not be reliable or reproducible 100%. We opened a bug and put it on the priority list. Well spotted everyone!

Also some testers made some interesting design request, I'm reminding you of this link on how to join the relevant mailing list to participate in unity design (the introduction text stated it though ;)).

We got also some comments of "key above tab" and why we used this terminology rather than directly telling, let's say "`". Please remember that this is a keyboard dependent configuration! The usa keyboard is normally using `, my azerty keyboard is using ², it seems that for some other configuration it's < or ~. So yeah, we have to keep the test cases as generic as possible, bare with us, please!

We added some new test cases as well due to a very particular way of triggering some bugs like for instance bug #877778. Thanks to the one adding a comment to explain how to trigger it!

Despite our strong efforts to make an easy way for unity restarting on a simple click from the tests (and improving it), it seems that the glibmm/compiz bug preventing to restart it reliably on demand is still an issue. It's not a very important bug for everyday use, however, it will be nice that we can get it over for the tests in particular. Fortunately, checkbox enables you to continue the tests where you stopped even if you had to restart your session.

A story of boot time

Finally and probably the most important feedback from the whole list, peope started to feel that "it was longer to start/boot". Jumping on this fact, we made some bootcharts on our machines to get real and precise values and you know what… the comments were right! The multimonitor support made the boot time badly regressing. Consequently, we decided to delay the release until today to get that fixed rather than pushing a version with this performance impact on intel cards. We finally got the fix, push it to trunk and now, this is all old story! Thanks to all the community for spotting this one, it's better to remark it earlier than later and this participation really had a visible impact (or rather avoided some real visible impact ;)) for a bunch of users. Well done!

The importance of testing defaults

Some testers remarked that in the system settings test, we never told to add gnome control center to the launcher. However, in the introduction text, we clearly expressed that we expect testers having the default settings (you have the guest session for it, use it, love it!) and the system settings is by default pinned in the launcher. For instance, intellihide is the default behavior and we didn't say anything to ensure that intellihide is there. If we did it, there will be a long list of prerequesites on the top of each test that I'm sure testers don't want to see? We strongly recommend people using the guest session to ensure all settings and environment are correct for the tests!

To sum up

Unity 5.2 is now building in the official repositories and should soon be available to all precise users. Thanks again to everyone participating in this project and see you soon for… 5.4 (or maybe a little bit before for an incoming compiz release that I heard of) !

Just finished some hacking for implementing some unity configuration options that are blessed by the design team, as shown in this official specification.

It contains as well other ui tweaks. You can notice in particular the "Restore defaults" options that work on each tabs and restore every page's defaults.

Those options are impacting both unity and unity-2d. This gave particular challenges as their features don't align (for instance, we don't show the "set launcher icon size" for 2d) and they don't have the same kind of "launcher hide mode". Also, some configuration options have more choices in ccsm than those shown in the ui (like if you want to reveal the launcher on the bottom-left corner, or if you are using the "dodge active window" mode. We tried to be clever on the ui side and not resetting any different setting you can have set in ccsm by just launching the ui.

We also had to do some choices, like what settings to take by default (on first ui launch), when you have different settings between unity 2d and unity 3d? As there are more ui to tweak 3d than 2d, I thus decided to take the settings from 3d at startup (and then, the settings will align).

Note that the "reveal spot" doesn't work right now for Top Left corner, but this is a compiz/unity bug and not yet (but soon will be!) implemented feature in 2d.

Finally, if you are using a non unity session like the gnome-panel or gnome-shell one, you won't be impacted by those new settings. You will still gain a new "Restore defaults" option though.

The package is currently building and will be available soon in Precise, enjoy!

Indeed, there is already one dynamic quicklist, appearing when you are making a copy operation which can take some time (when the copy dialog appears), giving the possibility to "display the copy dialog" and "stop all current copy operation". In addition to that, nautilus removes quite regularly all bookmarks and read them.

Surprinsingly, there is no API in libunity/dbusmenu to create "chunks" of menu and merge them at the end, which would be useful in cases like this one when an application have multiple quicklist update source. That means that we need to be nitpick so that one quicklist source doesn't erase the other. I've created some UnityQuicklistHandler GObject class for that impemented into Nautilus. Also, Nautilus can have multiple desktop files in the launcher, all of them are updated in the quicklist (and I tried to minimize memory consumption there).

Now that the Canonical rally is ending, I'm happy to announce that we released and uploaded Unity 5.0 to precise!

This is by far the most exciting and the best Unity released we ever had, and I'm happy that we've be able to accomplish all of this thanks to the community and the excellent developer team. We received a lot of testing and got more than 50 test results from my previous call for testing. Well done everyone! For some stat fans: 22 packages have been built for this release, and it's only the start! If you missed this test call, don't worry, next unity release is coming in a couple of weeks and you will surely hear about it!

Now, I think it would be useful to share the notes I've taken from the test results we collected. Here are some highlights on what seems to be relevant in my opinions:

We now have a tool to get the user test results from the result-tracker (posted by the hardware database). You can find it there: lp:~didrocks/+junk/resulttrackercollect (it only shows relevant data, not all tests that passed without any comment).

For upstream code:

the wrapper we wrote using the "unity" binary to make restarting unity easy for testers didn't work quite well: a lot of people got compiz hanging (seen as well on the forum). This is mostly due to compiz randomly hanging when using compiz --replace. Proposed solution: add in the unity tool a "killall compiz" before restarting it.

when restoring a semi-maximized application, the window placement is not the expected one (shifted compared to the cursor position). This is not a regression.

the "most used app entry" is not available to some users, we experienced that ourselves as well and had to kill zeitgeist-daemon (mhr3 was looking on the system but has no clue on what it can be). This should be looked seriously.

8 people didn't get zeitgeist returning the newly created "foo" file in dash/global-search-files-apps. as in the previous point, mhr3 looked at it and restarting zg fixed it. There is something to investigate there.

each time you click on the minimize button in the panel, dash opens, it becomes brighter (not a regression IIRC)

Multiple complains that the music lens doesn't show all the banshee library content.

2 people reported a failed launcher/quicklist-pin telling that running application icons aren't in the launcher anymore. Seems a bamfdaemon issue.

alt + F1 enters the keyboard navigation mode, but the second alt + F1 doesn't exit it. This is a regression from oneiric.

when you put the mouse under the launcher area, launcher hidden, press super, release it, the launcher stays displayed when it should hidden because you didn't move the mouse (design request, was working on Natty, is failing since Oneiric. This is a nux event issue.)

there is multiple reports about dragging icons in the launcher that are frozen and you have to initialize a drag again to fix it. I think this is not a regression.

tabs navigate between lenses, which is not what design specified (not a regression)

For designers:

people complained on wm/menu_basic that right clicking in the title bar works and bring a menu, but not when the application is maximized (as the title bar is in the panel). If we don't want to change that design-wise, we need to rephrase the test.

alttab/windows-focus-betweenapps-multiple-one was a design oversight with the new alt-tab, we discussed that with Jason and John and it's getting fixed. Not a regression as well.

We fixed one ourself in our pre-testing and so it's fixed in the release:

dash/show -> All lenses but the first one use the "broken" icon. I fixed it upstream.

Some work on checkbox/checkbox-unity

we need to rephrase launcher/intellihide-clickhold as it puzzled people or see how to make easier for people to trigger it (3 Fails, without any comments, seems user's error)

we removed "blank desktop" from the description on unity/startup after noticing some users were expecting "blank to be totally blank"

we made some checkbox patches (like, when checkbox crashes, the restore dialog asking you if you want to continue is focusing "yes" now instead of "no" (some people cried on the forum because of that! :/). There is one pending on making "escape" not quitting it.

checkbox doesn't work on a guest session due to sudo rights

on wm/auto_maximize, seems that there is wrong fail reports. We think that's because people are starting an application which is not big enough to be maximized (75% of the screen). We will write a test application for the user to just run "test" and size it at a suitable size.

we had more than 30 people starting the test on the french forum. 96 messages were exchanged related to those tests. We had people reporting the result manually on the forum because it seems they couldn't or they were not sured that the report got into result-tracker (there is no clear feedback that your report was successfully reported).

we need to rename in launcher/move-icons "bfb" to "first icon the launcher"

So, as a summary, it seems that there is no big blocker there and that can be fixed in the next release. You can now enjoy your new shiny Unity 5.0 on your precise installation! Thanks again to everyone involved in all this hard work put together and all the testing that have been done. You all rock!

On Oneiric?

Oh, and if you are on Oneiric, there is a new stable release update for unity 4.28 that will soon reach oneiric-proposed. It comes with a bunch of bug fixes, and even more! Do not hesitate to test and report feedbacks following the traditional SRU procedure.